An Old Couple
by Aryanne
Summary: The world's a mystery. Kaoru's no oldtime Sherlock Holmes, but no matter. Kenshin's always refused to be her Watson.


**Disclaimer - **I don't own Rurouni Kenshin.

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**An Old Couple**

Kaoru shut the bedroom door behind her and let out a small scream as she bounced off a man.

"Sorry, miss," he said, taking hold of her arm to help her regain her balance. "You must be our new guest."

"Yes," Kaoru said as he took his hand from her arm. "You must be Mr. Sagara. Your wife told me I'd probably run into you."

"I am." He held out his hand to shake. "Sano Sagara. You can call me Sano."

"Kaoru Kamiya," she said as she shook the elderly man's hand. He was the embodiment of an old outdoorsman: ruddy face, good health, blue jeans, boots, a brown coat. His handshake was firm.

"On your way to dinner?"

Kaoru nodded.

"I'll walk you there. What do you think of room four?"

"It's wonderful," Kaoru said enthusiastically. "I love how your wife decorated it, and the adjoining bathroom is a plus. It's a beautiful set of rooms."

Kaoru didn't miss the shadow that passed over Sano Sagara's face.

"Good," he said, "as long as you're satisfied then. Watch your step on the stairs," he said after a moment, "guests tend to trip over the fourth from the bottom for some reason."

"Thanks." Kaoru wondered if that had anything to do with room number four's reputation, but dismissed the thought. Her fiancé, Kenshin, was always teasing her for being too imaginative. In fact, he was the whole reason she was here in the first place.

"Oh there you two are," Mrs. Sagara said as they entered the dining room. "Sano, I was just about to go looking for you, you were taking so long. Have a seat you two, have a seat."

The long table was set for dinner with three sets of silverware.

"You're our only guest tonight, Kaoru," Mrs. Sagara said. "Times have been a little slow since the Ramada Inn opened downtown."

Kaoru smiled as she took her seat, brushing aside the white tablecloth. "I'm glad to be here. I've heard about this place my whole life."

"You mean you're from the area?" Mrs. Sagara asked in surprise. "Pardon me for asking, but I thought you were from Virginia."

"I've been living there for the past four and a half years," Kaoru explained to the older couple. "I graduated from college last spring, and now I'm working in D.C. I have an apartment there, so I'm in town to move the last of my stuff from my parent's house. But when I got to my parents house, my stuff was all over the living room. They turned my room into a gym."

Sano Sagara let out a gravelly laugh. "You must have been the last child at home."

Kaoru nodded and began serving herself from the platter arranged in the middle of the table. "I'm the youngest of four. They offered me the guest room, but I thought of this place, and decided to try it out." She gestured towards the window. "See? That's why my car's loaded down with stuff. I'm just glad I own a jeep."

Polite laughter and equally polite conversation followed. By dessert Kaoru felt comfortable asking the questions she'd really come to ask.

"Mrs. Sagara?" Kaoru asked during a lull in the conversation.

"You can call me Megumi, dear. What is it?"

"I was just wondering, how long have you owned this place?"

Megumi Sagara glanced to her husband thoughtfully. "How long has it been now, Sano? Ten years?"

"Eleven," he corrected.

"Oh yes, you're right. Why do you ask, Kaoru?"

Kaoru leaned forward over her apple pie, excited at the prospect of Sano and Megumi Sagara answering her questions. "Ever since I was little, I've heard stories about this place. It's like the local haunted house in town." She watched the faces of the two owners carefully. Mrs. Sagara's remained polite, while Mr. Sagara's seemed to gain the shadow she'd seen on it before. "I didn't even know this place was open to be honest. My parents told me it closed four years ago, but I just had to come by and check for myself. I'm glad it's open after all."

"What do you want to know?" Mr. Sagara asked gruffly.

Kaoru directed her words to him. "If it's haunted. Have you heard any strange noises, or seen any ghosts? Does it get freezing cold in the middle of the summer for no reason? And especially room four. A lot of bad things are supposed to have happened in there, like murders. The first one was when a woman stabbed herself to death because she found out she was pregnant after she was raped. And then two little kids that were guests found their father's gun, and the boy accidentally shot his sister. And then there was an old married couple-"

"You certainly know your history," Mr. Sagara broke in.

Kaoru nodded. "I've lived here my whole life. All this stuff happened before I was born, so I grew up with it on the playground. My cousin tried to scare us at night with spooky stories about this place a million times."

"You know," Mrs. Sagara said thoughtfully, "I think I have heard a baby cooing once or twice, which is strange since it's been fifteen years since our grandchildren were little. And it's always cold in room four. Why did you pick that room if you knew its history? By the way, there are some extra blankets in the closet if you need them."

"Thanks," Kaoru said. "Well, my fiancé always teases me about this place ever since it came up in conversation a while ago. I called him this afternoon and told him my parents had kicked me out of my old room, and he convinced me I had to come stay the night here."

Mrs. Sagara nodded. "Well be careful. Sometimes, if you believe something enough, it'll really happen. And that's not always a good thing."

"I for one, have never heard any babies cooing or felt any chills that weren't from the air-conditioning," Mr. Sagara broke in, standing. "Great meal, Megumi," he said as he lifted his plates from the table. "I'm going to take the dogs for a walk and chop some firewood for the fireplaces," he said on his way to the kitchen. "Miss Kamiya, I'll knock on your door later with firewood. Is that all right with you?"

"Yes, thank you," Kaoru said, watching as he placed his plates in the sink and went outside through the kitchen door. She was disappointed that he hadn't experienced anything strange in the eleven years he'd owned the place. But maybe he was just unreceptive to ghosts. She'd heard somewhere that there were people like that.

"Sano's very outdoorsy," Mrs. Sagara said fondly as she stood and began gathering the plates from the table. "I doubt he's in the house enough to have experienced anything out of the ordinary. Now why don't you check out the television in the living room? We've got two hundred channels."

"No thanks, but can I help you with those plates?"

"Oh no, no. That's what you paid for, not having to wash the dishes. I insist you go and find something more interesting to do."

"Do you mind if I explore the rest of the house?" Kaoru asked.

"Feel free to snoop around the upstairs," Mrs. Sagara consented. "The rooms that Sano and I use are downstairs, so you're free to wander the second floor and the attic. If you want any of the old things up there, just ask tomorrow morning. I think I'm going to head to bed after I finish these dishes. It's hard being an old woman, you know."

-

-

Kaoru sighed as she turned restlessly under the covers. Her search had been a bust. All five rooms upstairs and the attic had yielded nothing but dust, antique furniture, and old letters. Old letters were only interesting to a point. She vowed to make Kenshin pay her back the sixty bucks it had cost to spend the night. She hadn't heard one weird noise, felt one chill, or seen one ghost. The most exciting thing that had happened to her was when Mr. Sagara had knocked on the door to deliver the firewood as promised.

Granted, room four was a little chilly, but it was fall, and it was probably just the cracks in the window pane. A few extra blankets, and she was actually hot under her covers. There had been a scary moment when she'd thought she'd seen a tarantula in the far left corner of the closet as she'd opened it to get the blankets, but after jumping back and reminding herself there were no tarantulas this far north, she'd realized it was only a trick of the shadows.

Wait. Had that been a knock? She ceased tossing restlessly and listened hard.

There. She heard it again. What did Mr. or Mrs. Sagara want with her at two o'clock in the morning? Sighing, Kaoru rolled from under her covers and managed to land on her feet instead of the floor: just like a kung fu master would, she congratulated herself.

The person knocked again.

"Just a sec!" Kaoru yelled two steps from the door. She'd thought they were both nice old people. Did they have to be so impatient?

The knock came again as she was unlocking the door. She opened it.

No one was there.

Kaoru only blinked in her confusion. "Hello?"

Nothing.

"Hello?" She didn't understand how someone could knock as she'd been unlocking the door and then be gone a second later when she'd opened it. Well that was rude.

Angrily, Kaoru shut the door and started to lock it, when the person knocked again. She opened the door. Nothing but a dim hallway greeted her. She could see by the subtle lighting that no one was in the hallway.

So she shut the door. And the knocking came again.

So she opened the door. And no one was there. "Okay, now I'm really getting pissed," she said aloud. "I need to sleep!"

It was very cold in her room now. The fire had faded to embers. Kaoru was about to shut the door and make a leap for the bed, when something caught her eye. There was a lump in the middle of the bed, as if someone was sitting, Indian-style, underneath her covers. She did have a lot of covers, but not enough to make a lump that size. It looked like a small child was under there.

She heard little kid laughter. The sound came from her bed. There was no way anyone could have gotten into the room. She was on the second floor. It wasn't like there was a fire escape outside her window, and she'd been standing in the doorway worried about the knocker, so no one could have entered that way. She forcibly stopped herself from screaming.

"I wanna see," the voice spoke from under her sheet. "I wanna see," it repeated. "It's no fair you get to see first." It sounded like a little girl.

"Hello?" Kaoru managed to say. Her voice came out scratchy and unnaturally high pitched.

"Being older isn't a reason," the girl's voice continued whining. The lump under the covers stayed absolutely still.

It was probably just a lump of covers. That and, well, she must be hearing things.

"Why are you pointing it at me?" the voice asked. "That's mean."

"I-I'm not pointing anything at you," Kaoru stammered.

"Fine," the voice pouted, "But I get to play with it next."

"Play with what?" Kaoru asked, confused. Then it hit her. The boy who'd accidentally killed his little sister with his dad's gun. Sure he'd grown up and was probably a depressed middle aged man living in a trailer park outside of Reno for all she knew, but what if… What if his sister was still right here, reliving the accident, over and over? Every night.

A bang sounded in the room. Kaoru jumped and slammed her hands over her ears to stop the echo from resonating in her head, her eyes glued to the lump on the bed. It was deflating in front of her eyes, like the wicked witch of the west melting into a puddle. Kaoru was convinced that if she went over, if she pulled back the covers, she would see a little ghost girl's dead body. But that was silly. Ghost girls don't have dead bodies.

Shivering, she walked over to the bed and yanked back the covers before she had the chance to think. Nothing rested between the blankets and the mattress but air.

A woman screamed behind her. Kaoru didn't just turn, she whipped around. For a second she thought she saw something, a faint image of a woman with a sad expression on her face and a knife in her hand, but it was gone before she could blink. As if the woman had been a reflection of her own emotions, she was suddenly overwhelmed by an intense feeling of sadness. Every bad experience she'd ever had, all the times when people she'd trusted had let her down, all the fights she'd gotten in with friends and family, all the sad movies she'd cried over, all the funerals, all the murders she'd heard about on television, all the guilt from bad decisions she'd made: all that came back to her at once, in a severe flash of emotion.

Kaoru sank down on the bed and cried. She was too sad to feel fear as wind started to stir within the room, ruffling the curtains and rifling through the open pages of the book she'd been reading. The temperature dropped even lower. She could see her breath, but it didn't matter. Why should she care about anything? She was going to die anyway, why not stop prolonging the suffering and end it sooner? Her parents had been happy to see her leave, her friends were spread around the world since graduation, and Kenshin was probably cheating on her anyway.

Kenshin.

Weeping, she crawled over to the table, fumbled for her cell phone, and managed to call his number from her phonebook menu. The blurry screen said the call was 'in progress'. Then it switched to 'connected'. Kaoru hugged her body with her free arm, wishing she could stop crying.

"Hi, Kaoru," his voice came through the line, sounding cheerful.

"Kenshin," she sobbed into the phone. Would she cry the rest of her life away?

"Kaoru? Are you okay? What's wrong?"

"Kenshin, help," Kaoru said, her voice choked.

"Kaoru? Kaoru! Where are you? Are you at that bed and breakfast place?"

Kaoru couldn't talk anymore. If she'd thought she was crying hard before, she was weeping as much as four people now. Why had she called Kenshin? It was useless. Everything was useless. She was so cold.

"Kaoru, what's wrong!" Mrs. Sagara ran in the open door, her husband close behind her. The old woman gasped. "It's freezing!" She made to walk to where Kaoru was crying in the center of the room, but her husband held her back.

"You can't touch her," he said. Kaoru didn't know if he was talking to her or his wife.

"Sano?" his wife questioned.

"You can't touch her or you'll remember, Megumi. It's better if you don't remember."

And then Kaoru remembered. The last tragedy in room four had been the death of an old couple. The woman had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, so the husband had taken his wife three states away to this bed and breakfast. They'd stayed in room four for three days, and on the fourth, the husband had shot her and killed himself. The cousin who'd told her their story said their last name had been Segra, which sounded too much like Sagara to be a coincidence.

The realization was too much for her. She passed out.

-

-

"Wake up, Kaoru. Please, wake up."

The first face Kaoru saw was Kenshin's, peering anxiously down at her. On his forehead was that little crease that appeared whenever he was worried. She realized she wasn't crying anymore. Next, she realized she was still in room four, still in the bed and breakfast. Only it was different. There was no furniture in the room, and the windows were boarded up. She could only see Kenshin's face because someone was shining a flashlight beam on them.

"Kenshin. How'd you get here?" she asked. Her voice came out clogged. She couldn't have stopped crying all that long ago.

"Oh my God, honey, I'm so glad you're awake."

"Mom?" Kaoru asked as Kenshin helped her sit up. She saw her father hovering anxiously behind her mom. "Dad? How'd you get here?"

"Kenshin called us, Kaoru," her father answered. "How'd you get here? We told you this place had closed. You could've gotten hurt."

"But it was open…" Kaoru began, and then realized the room proved her otherwise.

Her three rescuers shared an uneasy glance.

"Let's get you out of here," her mom finally said.

Kenshin walked her down the hall with an arm around her waist as they followed her parents through the gloom of the dark hallway. "What happened? You were crying on the phone."

Kaoru shook her head. "I don't know."

They reached the top of the steps.

"Watch your step," Kaoru called to her father who was in the lead. "Guests tend to trip over the fourth from the bottom." It all came flooding back to her. But if Mr. and Mrs. Sagara had been ghosts, then how had they fed her dinner? She still felt full. How had Mr. Sagara brought her firewood? She'd felt the warmth. Had it all been a hallucination? She wasn't on drugs. Things like this didn't happen to people who weren't on drugs.

"You're crying, Kaoru," Kenshin said in her ear.

Kaoru touched her fingers to her cheek. They came away wet.


End file.
